A love letter to Jack Kirby, this series focuses on Mainframe, a retired member of the Galactic Bounty Hunters who becomes a comic creator and starts a family. Jack Berkley is a famous comic creator, using his previous adventures with the GBH as fodder for his comic stories. When one of his former enemies seeks out Jack’s evidence on his mother, Jack’s son Garrett is kidnapped and whisked away on an intergalactic journey, learning that his father isn’t a “joke” and that he was once the hero Mainframe. Suiting up and getting his old team back together, Jack seeks out his captured son and goes all out in order to defeat Slugg and stop the evidence keeping Slugg’s mother in prison from being destroyed!

A very short synopsis, but one that sums up this amazing tale. While some of Kirby’s art is used in this collection, most of it is not Jack’s but the artists do an amazing job of coping his style and giving the whole trade a great feel. I wish this collection had been in hardcover, as that is my preferred way to collect trades, but just having this is great. I really love the Kirby esthetic, which includes his writing style, which this does a fine job of mimicking, and his character designs, with their unique costumes and color pallets. The story here is great, allowing all of the members of the GHB to shine and giving us some father-son realizations in the process. We even get a cameo from Captain Victory, which is amazing!

Each of the six collected issues is massive, allowing the story to breath. Also included is a bunch of art and interviews with the creators behind this collection, which adds more depth, if reading that stuff is your thing. All-in-all, what can I say, I’m a Jack Kirby fan and even though he didn’t writer or draw this entire collection, with his daughter at the helm, if fells as if he had!

At some point last summer, while back home in South Jersey, my friend, LabyB, found this little gem for her boyfriend, who has a minor swords-and-sorcery comic collection.

Well, fast forward to today, when I discover that he’s “trimming-the-fat” from his collection and he gives me this issue, because he noticed that it had a cover by Jack Kirby. I thanked him for the gift and flipped though it, disappointed that it didn’t have Kirby art or story on the inside, but having just read Silver Star, and getting myself in a Kirby-mood, I decided to read this issue anyway, and boy am I glad that I did!

While Kirby only provides the cover, the story and art belong Michael Thibodeaux, a name I wasn’t familiar with. This comic has fantasy elements and takes place at the end of the Viking Era and features a group of Viking Heroes that could rival the Warriors Three. This issue sets up our heroes and their conflict and does it by telling an interesting story with interesting characters and does it in an “old-school” manner that hasn’t been seen in a while. Even though it’s not Kirby, the art really holds up and pretty darn good for the genre, feeling like a marriage between the Marvel’s Conan comics and their Epic Illustrated magazine.

I’m glad that my friend was cleaning his collection and that this little gem could have landed in my lap, because I now on the hunt for the remaining issues, because I need to know what happens to our Last Viking Heroes!

Truly Jack Kirby’s wildest concept, Silver Star tells the story of Morgan Miller, a name who is the next evolution of human: Homo-Geneticus! During an engagement Viet Nam, Morgan displays a feat of incredible strength, by lifting a throwing a tank, and afterward discovers his true potential, as a super-powered being. Wearing a silver suit, designed to contain his powers, Morgan becomes the Silver Star, a man with the abilities of atom rearrangement (think Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen), he can teleport, astral project and create with a thought. He becomes aware that his father, a doctor and scientist, had experimented on many subjects, including his own son, while they were in the womb, in order to create a version of man who could withstand the atomic bomb. Morgan is connected to these “Others” and wishes to seek them out in order to stop one of their own, the villain Darius Drumm, a powerful Homo-Geneticus who was raised by a cult, which has given him many mental scars (to match his outward ones) and seeks to remake the world as he sees fit. Drumm and Morgan seek the “Others”, with Drumm killing off most but Morgan is able to find a few, one of which is a female stunt woman named Norma Richmond, with whom he starts a relationship and helps him defeat Drumm.

My synopsis on this one isn’t great, because there is a lot going on here, but if you liked anything that I mentioned, then you must read this, because I absolutely loved this story! I love, pretty much everything that Jack Kirby has created, so I can’t tell if I’m biased or not, but I thought that there were some very interesting concepts here, that could have been explored, had this been written in a post-Watchmen era. Jack’s art is fantastic and the new coloring makes each page stand out, especially Jack’s double-paged splash pages. The story is good, but most of the dialogue is a bit dated by now, but that’s to be expected. This collection also includes a copy of Jack Kirby’s original screenplay, because this story was meant to be a movie with the ability to expand into other mediums.

I picked this one up on a whim, not knowing what to expect from it and I’m glad that I did! This was the last series that Kirby did and I think that he ended his creative and professional career on a high note!